conference proceedings - Australian Army

THE VIETNAM SYNDROME: A BRIEF HISTORY
To these analysts, it seemed possible to think of the veterans as new and different
sorts of patients, those whose psychological illness was the result of the stresses they
experienced in war. Furthermore, these analysts found it possible to argue that a war
whose origins, conduct, and expected outcome were so controversial that it would
engender more psychological casualties than wars of a more straightforward kind. 7 None
of this was correct, but during the 1970s some facts appear to have been inconvenient
in American public discourse. 8
One symptom of the post-Vietnam syndrome was advertised as new and dangerous:
these traumatic reactions were delayed, not showing themselves for months or even
years after the traumatic event. Further, these reactions could supposedly occur without
warning, at any time. The New York Times published a story in 1975 of a case in which a
Vietnam veteran was convicted of murdering his wife. The veteran’s defence was that he
had been startled awake by a combat flashback and had instinctively pulled the gun from
under his pillow and defended himself. An unsympathetic jury gave him life in prison.
Citing statistics gathered during what he called a ‘comprehensive series of stories’ in
Penthouse magazine, the journalist Tom Wicker informed the readers of his column in
The New York Times that as many as 500,000 of the 2.5 million Vietnam veterans had
attempted suicide, conveying the impression that every vet was deranged. 9 News like
this routinely appeared during the 1970s, and Hollywood discovered Rambo as well.
Throughout the decade, the American public was engaged in highly complex
negotiations with the memory of the war in Vietnam. The process by which the
Vietnam veteran became a metaphor for the nation as a whole began very soon after
President Nixon ordered the withdrawal of American forces. In January, 1970, Lifton
and several other prominent psychiatrists were called to testify before the Senate on the
care and treatment of wounded Vietnam veterans. Lifton devoted his testimony to the
‘psychological predicament of the Vietnam Veteran’. Although Lifton did not employ
7. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Oversight of Medical Care of Veterans
Wounded in Vietnam, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Veterans’ Affairs, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess; 27
January 1970: 498-9. (Hereinafter cited as ‘Lifton Testimony’.) Lifton drew precisely this corollary in
testimony before the Senate.
8. Several contemporary studies are summarised in Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor, 141-51. Wars have
long known psychological casualties. Modern military medicine had itself hardly come of age before
taking notice of such casualties. From the Russo-Japanese War onward, the medical services of most
advanced armies struggled to understand psychological distress due to combat. The psychological
casualties produced by the Vietnam War were not inordinately high; by one count, those amounted to
roughly half of those produced by World War II American troops—a fact reported once more in 1975
by David Lamb, ‘Vietnam Veterans Melting into Society’, Los Angeles Times, 3 November 1975. See
also Captain R. L. Richards’ precocious article, ‘Mental and Nervous Diseases in the Russo-Japanese
War’, The Military Surgeon XXVI (1910), 177-93. For a brief introduction to this subject, see my ‘Shell
Shock’, American Heritage 41: 4 (May/June, 1991), 75-87.
9. Tom Wicker, ‘The Vietnam Disease’, The New York Times, 27 May 1975, 29.
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